Are You Successful & Free
Success has different standards of achievement for different people.
For some success means being the best in the world while for others success can be just the fact that they survived one more day.
Not everyone aspires to be the richest in the world, or the most powerful, or the best in their art, sport or field. Some of us are content being our best and consistently aspiring to improve.
Too many though are content with yesterday’s successes and allow one day to merge into another with no real struggle to grow, improve or further achieve even the littlest.
Yet surely there must be one common parameter that ties all of humankind to a common definition of success. Just like there are many ways of being alive and each of us can choose what we do with being alive yet being alive needs us all to do at least one common thing - breathe.
If we cease to breathe, we no longer exist in this world.
Similarly for success. Just as each of us can be successful in our own ways and we can choose for ourselves; success itself needs all of us to do at least one common thing - make willing choices.
The compelled life is failure.
It doesn’t matter what else we possess, if our choices are not our own, and more, our actions arise from unwillingness.
We may need to coerce and compel ourselves to do immediately what we don’t feel like doing or don’t like to do. Yet this type of coercion is success because it arises from our own choosing and willing.
Failure is when someone else is able to compel and control us. It is the fate of every wild animal that is captured and caged by humankind. To jump through hoops and leap through rings of fire, to lift heavy logs on command and be the beast of burden for mans’ selfish pleasures.
God has given us the greatest gifts. (1) Life (2) Free Choice (3) Independent Will.
We fail (regardless of what we possess) when we abdicate these gifts and allow someone else to feel and act as though we were victim and slave to him or her.
It is truly wonderful if you are able to be a willing servant, or a willing person of service to another, or a willing partner in providing pleasure to someone else. If it’s your choosing and willingness, it’s beautiful.
Yet to live a life feeling constantly compelled, and acting out that sense of being forced to do what you don’t want, enjoy or even like, comes only from immorality and godlessness.
It happens to people who give up their rights and responsibilities for momentary gain and satisfaction but end up finding that there seems to be no way out of it.
If you are interested, you will find the type in the Bible in the story of Esau. It won’t take long and the links to the story are below if you choose to read.
Parents need to coerce their wards until the children grow up and are able to realise the consequences of their own actions. For any parent, any individual, to try and attempt to coerce an adult into anything, also arises from godlessness and lack of character.
Great leaders practise the skill of “Buy -in”. This enables them to recruit other willing individuals into a case those individuals were unaware of until they came across this leader.
Poor cultures in organisations, communities and families come from the ability of a few, or even one person’s ability, to coerce the others. This ability comes not so much from the individual’s strength, but more from the weakness of others.
The gift of life exists only with choice and willingness. Give up these two things and you remain just a trained, walking talking animal. In a much worse situation than animals truly because your potential is so much.
Often, we don’t know what to do next. We feel stuck because we can’t see the way forward. We excuse our inertia and our apparent helplessness by scaring ourselves of the unknown future. We then begin to exchange our current useless existence with an unknown unarticulated terrible future and feel we are making the right choice. So many tend to remain in trapped, caged, animal existence.
Yet there are two ways of learning and making decisions. The first is to know exactly what we want to do and go ahead and do it.
The second is to be clear one hundred percent of what we don’t want for ourselves and simply refuse to continue in that path.
Knowing what we don’t want for sure is equally, if not more important, than knowing what we want.
Simply refusing to be, who you don’t want to be, is a great way of moving forward.
It is perhaps even the first and most important characteristic of being successful.
We need nothing from another person.
This is true only if we don’t find someone who is willing to acknowledge, affirm, and appreciate us as a person. Nothing that is offered and made available to us matters is we become another object in our own and the others’ eye.
Everything we need comes to us from another person.
If we find and treat ourselves and others as persons, we begin to have meaningful and fulfilling relationships that make us feel lighter yet more whole.
Too many of us have sold our birth right – to possess the dignity of being a person – and chosen to become objects of pleasure.
Esau’s story in two parts